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On a warm Brooklyn weekend, near the end of the 1955 school term, Wayne, a
skinny ten-year old boy with glasses that kept slipping down his nose, heard a
noise he had never heard before. He had grown used to the sounds of honking
automobiles, whining police sirens and the calls of neighboring women hanging
their laundry on clotheslines that connected like umbilical cords the
neighborhood apartment buildings.
"Sylvie," a woman would shout.
"What, Rosa? You need something?"
"You got some talcum powder? The baby got a rash and Anthony don't get paid
till tomorrow."
A few minutes later, Sylvie would call back. "It's on the line. Take what
you need but send it back. My Sammy needs it for his feet." And Wayne would
look down from his fifth-story window and see a cloth pouch hung by a wooden
clothespin being pulled from Sylvia Kaplan's apartment on the third floor to
Rosa Santini's place across the way.
But on this day, in the cement courtyard formed by the neighboring
apartments, littered with fallen laundry, girlie magazines and who-knows-what-else that
occasionally came streaming out of a window, Mr. Turkin was doing something
Wayne couldn't understand.
Mr. Turkin was not only the owner of the apartment house, but he and Mrs.
Turkin were Wayne's adopted grandparents. The Turkins' two sons had committed
the worst sin children in the neighborhood could ever commit against their
parents. They grew up, married and moved away, taking the Turkins' grandchildren
with them. True, they only moved to a Long Island suburb, but for the Turkins,
who didn't drive, they may as well have moved to Timbuktu.
Wayne became their surrogate grandson and Mrs. Turkin took it upon herself to
fatten him up. She'd bake sugar cookies and apple strudel and regularly slip
him a brisket sandwich on fresh rye bread with a sour pickle.
"Don't tell your mother," she'd say. "On what she cooks, a boy could
starve."
And Mr. Turkin, who wore his key chain and tool belt as proudly as a young
doctor might wear a stethoscope, took it upon himself to show Wayne how to fix
things, like a running toilet or a short in the electrical wiring.
"So what are you doing, Mr. Turkin?" Wayne asked, watching the wiry old man
with thinning white hair take a sledgehammer to a small area of concrete he had
chalked out in the middle of the courtyard.
"I'm making a garden," Mr. Turkin said.
"What's that?"
Mr. Turkin looked at Wayne with a mixture of sadness and dismay. "You don't
know what is a garden?"
"I think I do. Is that with flowers and stuff?"
"That's right, boychik," he said, patting Wayne's head. "But we're gonna
grow vegetables — tomatoes and peppers." Then he handed the sledgehammer to the
boy. "Here, you do it. I need a rest."
Wayne could barely lift the sledgehammer. Still, he managed to slam it
against the concrete a few times before Mr. Turkin took it back. Wayne could see
large perspiration stains under the arms of the white shirt Mr. Turkin always
wore. Mud caked his baggy pants held up by suspenders. After a few hours, the
patch of concrete was broken to expose rock-hard soil. "Now, for you I have
a job. The burlap sacks I keep in the cellar near the wine barrels, bring
them here. We have to pick up all these pieces of cement."
It took the rest of the day to load the cement pieces into the sacks and drag
them to the cellar. Mr. Turkin made a place for them along the wall where he
kept a rusted bicycle, pieces of pipe and other odd items. "They may come in
handy someday," the old man explained. "You should never throw away."
The next day, Mr. Turkin showed Wayne how to loosen the encased soil with a
shovel. Later, they added sand, sawdust and horse manure from the police
stable not far from the neighborhood. Something about the smell of the sawdust
made the manure odor seem less unpleasant to Wayne.
"When do we plant the tomatoes?" the boy asked.
"When the soil is ready," Mr. Turkin explained.
The next thing Mr. Turkin did was build a wrought iron fence around the small
garden. Mr. Turkin included a gate with a heavy iron lock on it. He gave
Wayne a key and showed him how to open the lock. "Me and you, boychik, we got
the only keys to the Essex Street Garden. You, I trust. The others," he
slapped at the air with the back of his hand, "pppfffttt."
This was the only time Wayne could ever remember a compliment from Mr.
Turkin, directed towards him or anyone for that matter.
When the soil was ready, they planted six tomato and six pepper plants. Mr.
Turkin showed the boy how to fertilize the plants and how to weed the garden
without getting too close to the plants' roots.
The vegetables never grew as large as Wayne's Jack-in-the-Beanstalk
imagination, but for the next three years — until his own parents, too, committed the
unpardonable sin and moved to Long Island — this would be Wayne's favorite
place. All summer, he'd put on his old Brooklyn Dodger cap, and work in the
garden, often carrying pitchers of water from Mrs. Cusick's basement apartment.
When the vegetables came in, he and Mr. Turkin enjoyed tomato and pepper
sandwiches on rye bread — with a little mustard and a sour pickle, of course.
A few years after his family moved to the suburbs, Wayne heard that Mr.
Turkin had died and later the old neighborhood was torn down and replaced with a
low-income housing project. Wayne Scheer, now a man approaching sixty, with
trifocals that keep slipping down his nose, still remembers the taste of the
tomatoes and peppers he and Mr. Turkin picked from the Essex Street Garden.
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